The July 12 move to delay action
until after the November election by the state Legislature capped a series of
delays and political maneuvers that have frustrated marriage supporters.

This setback shows that Catholics
need to take the issue more seriously , said C.J.
Doyle, executive director for the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts.

Lawmakers are “subservient to the
powerful homosexual lobby,” Doyle said after the hearing. “We need greater
Catholic militancy. The other side is waging a desperate struggle over a vital
issue, and we are too easygoing.”

Although Boston Cardinal Sean
O’Malley and the state’s other three bishops strongly support the amendment,
action at the local level has been checkered, according to parishioners surveyed.

At issue now is not only the goal
of the amendment — to let voters in 2008 define marriage as the union of one
man and one woman — but also lawmakers’ apparent disregard for the rule of law
by repeatedly ducking the issue since 2002.

A statement from VoteOnMarriage.org,
the coalition that sponsored the initiative petition amendment, labeled the
delay “a clear political attempt to insulate incumbent legislators at the polls
this November from recording their vote on marriage.”

The coalition had worked hard for
a vote on the measure, which seeks to restore to voters a voice denied to them
by a 2003 judicial ruling that imposed same-sex “marriage” on the Commonwealth.

Volunteers gathered a record
170,000 signatures on a petition to support the amendment, and the coalition
successfully fought off spurious charges of signature fraud and a lawsuit over
its constitutionality. In May lawmakers postponed the issue until July.

On July 10 the Supreme Judicial Court, the same court
that made the 2003 decision, unanimously ruled that the amendment was
constitutionally valid. Although marriage supporters applauded the outcome,
they were dismayed by wording in the ruling that in essence invited a different
challenge to the amendment should it be passed.

Dan Avila, policy director for the
Massachusetts Catholic Conference, said, “Many law professors, including
supporters of same-sex ‘marriage,’ are expressing shock over the judges’
premeditated power grab.”

Commenting on the lawmakers’
dodge, Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts
Family Institute, said, “The legislative leadership has made the birthplace of
American democracy its new graveyard.”

By contrast, those seeking to keep
the status quo welcomed the recess, which they had openly bragged about helping
to engineer.

“We dodged the bullet and now we
have a chance to possibly win in November,” said Arline
Isaacson, co-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Gay & Lesbian Political
Caucus.

Isaacson said her lobby team “had
worked with the House and Senate leadership to postpone the vote on the
amendment as part of a strategy to give MassEquality
and its allies more time to line up the 151 votes needed to defeat the
amendment,” the homosexual newspaperBay Windows reported.

Both sides acknowledged that if
the issue had come to a vote yesterday, marriage supporters would have won. If
the measure clears legislative approval in two consecutive years, it can go on
the ballot in the following year.

Some observers are hopeful this
can still happen.

“I think reports of the death of democracy
in Massachusetts have been exaggerated,” said
Scott Fitzgibbon, law professor at BostonCollege who last year
testified before the U.S. Senate on behalf of a federal marriage amendment. In
an e-mail interview, he predicted that despite the delay, “the measure will get
a fair hearing and a vote” in November.

The Massachusetts Catholic
Conference intends to keep working with VoteOnMarriage
to do just that, said Executive Director Edward Saunders, who is spokesman for
all four bishops on this issue. But, he stressed, people need to do more
grassroots lobbying.

That will be a formidable task to
counter the level of homosexual activism that resulted in the latest
legislative dodge. According to Marc Solomon of MassEquality,
25 canvassers have been going door-to-door seven days a week in districts with
potentially swingable legislators to defeat the
amendment.

A spokeswoman for Senate President
Robert Travaglini, who headed the constitutional
convention, said the recess was called to give lawmakers time to deal with
other “important legislation.”

“On the face of it, this move
gives even sleaze a bad name; it’s despicable at several levels,” observed
Hadley Arkes, political science professor at AmherstCollege.

In an interview, Arkes said, “The question of marriage has been part of the
very matrix of the laws since there have been ‘laws.’ To treat this matter as
something peripheral, something to be put aside in favor of other things, is to
suggest that ‘matters of moral consequence are the matters of least consequence
for us.’

“Apart from evading an issue of
real consequence, what we have here is nothing less than a cynical denial of
the idea of government by consent or popular government. This move seems to be
folding itself into the larger pattern that we’ve seen at work over 30 years,
as the political class becomes willing to shift more and more responsibility to
the courts.”

“It’s so much better if those
contentious issues (like abortion and same-sex ‘marriage’) can be handled by
those politicians in robes who don’t have to do such straining things as run
for reelection,” he said.

Arkes warned that this trend is eroding
freedom of speech and representative government.

“This takes contentious issues out
of the domain of public politics, in which ordinary folks can deliberate in
public about the laws that will be made for them. And indeed we are hearing the
argument that it is churlish to be discussing this matter or demanding a vote —
indeed, that even expressing reservations or opposition may be a species of
hate-speech.”

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